Grierson and Blackburn's Medieval European Coinage volume I: The Early Middle Ages can be previewed on Google Books. Amazon will sell the paperback for $89 new. The hardcover is worth much more; at least one was recently sold for $200 by Charles Davis.

Alan Stahl's Zecca: The Mint of Venice in the Middle Ages can be had for $20 from David Brown. Amazon still wants $80 for it. Google has a preview of it which surprised me. Previously ANS titles have been in snippet format. So either the ANS has given permission or the Google/rightholder suit, which settled out-of-court, is already yielding benefits.

Recommended reading are the “dinar”, “dirham” and “fals” entries in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, a 13 volume set that costs $800. Also recommended are the “coins and coinage”, “dinar”, and “dirham” in the Encyclopedia Iranica. Some volumes of that encyclopedia are available from used Amazon starting around $70 but I don't know which volumes include these entries.

Steve Album's A Checklist of Islamic Coins (2nd ed.) is hard-to-find. Used copies of the first edition can be found for $50. Album often sells copies at NYINC for $20, so it is possible he has some but doesn't advertise them on his website http://www.stevealbum.com/.

Michael Bates, Islamic Coins (ANS Handbook 2, New York, 1982) is a complete mystery. I have never heard of ANS handbooks and they don't appear on the list of ANS publications series. The library entry says it's 52 pages plus 36 color slides. The library has sets of slides made in 1971 and 2 for Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins, numbered 1, 2 and 3, but the Islamic slides are not #4 of the Education slide program. I couldn't find an ANS Handbook 1.

The final general Islamic titles is a three part paper, “Islamic Numismatics”, in the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin from 1978 and 1979. These issues are no longer available from the publisher.

2 comments:

In thinking about late Roman Provincials at one point it occurred to me that an interesting study or collection would be a "last coins" collection. There must have been many prominent ancient cities that had a flourishing coinage early in their history, but that declined into minor coinless settlements as the Middle Ages arrived. It would be interesting to see an interactive map of both the appearance and also the disappearance of autonomous coinage in many of these places.